I won't go through ANY of the details - Durston, like many creationists, prefers overly verbose rhetoric to concise language, but feel free to slog through all his patronizing gibberish if you'd like. Others dealt with the technical details of Durston's claims, but I found this short statement very informative:

The question is, is the functional information encoded in the gene that codesfor RecA an example of ID? (I choose RecA because it is an average lengthprotein, it is a universal protein found in all life forms, and I've done somework on it.) To answer that question, we need a scientific method to identifyexamples of ID that does not yield false positives, yet does not rule outobvious examples of ID (such as Venter's 'watermarks', or laptop computers) andis general (i.e., can be applied to forensics, SETI, archeology, and biology).

When I read this (re-read it, actually - I had read the entire exchange some months ago) this really struck me as profound.And maybe I am just slow and others ahve already recognized this, but it seems ot me their entire line of reasoning regarding "informaiton" and how evolution cannot account for it rests on one little subtle assumption. But it is a big one - a great big foundational assumption which makes their entire 'no new infromation' enterprise little more than a tautology.

Can you see it?

It isn't about ID detection methods or the arcane mathematical details that accompany his boasts. It is this:

...is the functional information encoded in the gene that codesfor RecA anexample of ID?

The functional information ENCODED IN the gene.Why would they think it is intelligently derived? Because that start out with the a priori position that the 'information' that the gene contains/possesses was PUT IN IT. It is ENCODED:

And how is this 'conversion' done if NOT by an intelligent agent, right?

They start out with the assumption that a gene did not arise via natural means and by virtue of the arrangement of it's nucleotides and ends up producing a useful protein, no they start out assuming that a specific protein was needed/desired and that the gene was then 'somehow' acquired in order to make this needed/desired protein.

In other words, they start out assuming what they want to be true.To be fair, I suppose one could say the same of non-IDcreationists. They start out with the assumption that genes are natural entities, polynucleotides shaped by natural forces into a gene that when transcribed and translated makes something useful.

The difference is, the IDcreationist has mere faulty analogies to support their position.

Mike Pence (R-IN) says he "admires" Rush Limbaugh. He said this defending Limbaugh's latest racist screed about how we are going to have to "bend over" becaue Obama is black.

Sure, Mike - and every other Republican sycophant.. Admire away.

What is not to admire - and take marching orders from - a draft dodging coward like Limbaugh?

A family-values advocate with 3 divorces under his belt.

A good Christian man wio smuggles Viagra to the Dominican Republic. Why would he do that? He wasn't married at the time, so he didn't need them for intramarital relations. Must have been for the underage male prostitutes that the Dominacan Republic is known for.

Blow him some kisses, Mike! Maybe he'll take you with him next time.

And I won't even mention his addiciton to Hillbilly Heroin...

I think it says quite a bit about the people who would 'admire' and 'respect' such a pathetic hypritical pile of filth like Limbaugh.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

I was reading through a creation/evolution discussion board recerntly and the website creationsafaris.com came up. Creationsafaris is the baby of David Coppedge, a computer scientist employed by NASA, who also happens to be a rather adept disinformation peddlar for Christ.Now, I've read some of Coppedge's stuff before, but I'd not visited his site for some time, so I decided to pay a visit and I was reminded of why I hadn't been there in a while - to describe the site as inflammatory is putting it mildly. I searched his site for some issues of interest to me, and no surprise, I was soon rewarded with a number of highly misinforming/disinforming smug dismissals of legitimate science and that characteristic cherry-picking of quotes to employ as 'look how little evolutinists know!' fodder.And let us not forget his condescending name calling and the like.Take a look at this masterpiece of flim flammery, sleight of hand, and inflammatory disinformation, my comments interspersed:

The Hopeless Task of Building Evolutionary Trees07/25/2002A paper posted in the online early addition July 25 of the Proceedings ofthe National Academy of Sciences starts out with an optimistic subtitle: “Anefficient solution for the problem of large phylogeny estimation,” but thenopens with a tone of despair:

Optimality criterion-based phylogeny inference is anotoriously difficult endeavor because the number of solutions increasesexplosively with the number of taxa. Indeed, the total number of possibleunrooted, bifurcating tree topologies among T-terminal taxa ... [corresponds] tonearly 32 billion different trees for 14 taxa and 3 X 1084 trees (i.e., morethan the number of atoms in the known universe) for 55 taxa. ... As mostmathematicians expect that no such algorithm [i.e., polynomial time solution]exists, one is forced to admit that no future civilization will ever build acomputer capable of solving the problem while guaranteeing that the optimalsolution has been found.

Instead of number-crunching the impossible, the authors propose a heuristicapproach. Heuristic approaches sacrifice the goal of getting an optimal tree inhopes of getting one faster that has maximum likelihood (ML).

Um, no... I would think that a taxpayer-funded NASA "scientist" like David Coppedge would at least try to understand the material he is bashing, but I guess that is too much to ask of a creationist. Even a NASA employee. The whole point of a heuristic search is still to find the optimal tree, but to do so without having to examine every single possible arrangement of taxa.

Can a 'computer geek' like Coppedge really not know this?

As this applies to phylogeny searches, look at it this way (A spectacularly simplified example) - say you have DNA sequences from 4 taxa and you want to do a phylogenetic analysis. Their sequences are:

We can note that sequences 1 and 2 differ by only one substitution; 1 and 3 by two; 1 and 4 by 8; etc., and we know that taxon 4 is not closely related to the other three. If we choose to root our tree (that is, if we recognize that one of the taxa in our analysis will be the most distantly related to all the others), there are 15 possible arrangements that could be produced (we can quickly see which taxon this is going to be, but we would want to test each one to be sure). Now, we could simply draw out all 15 possible arrangements, count up the number of nucleotide changes needed to 'describe' each tree, then pick the tree with the fewest changes as our optimal tree. But that would take, if we use 5 minutes drawing and calculating each arrangement for our example, 75 minutes. Now, if we employ a heuristic search algorithem, we do not draw and calculate every possible tree, because we can immediately discard 'bad' trees/arrangements without having to draw and calculate them.For example, a quick comparison of each pair of sequences tells us what I wrote above ("We can note that sequences 1 and 2 differ by only one substitution...") and we can use this information, which can be generated in much less than 5 minutes, to see which groupings are the most likely. In our little example here, we can see that taxa 1 and 2 are the closest, with taxon 3 joining the group of 1 and 2, with taxon 4 as out outgroup. So we know that taxon 4 will be the outgroup, therefore, we only have to draw and calculate how taxa 1, 2, and 3 should group. And as we established that taxa 1 and 2 are the closest, there is only one tree that will do. This can be calculated in maybe 10 minutes, if we do it by hand, and use the "heuristic" I just described, which is essentially what computer analysis programs do (albeit, obviously, with much more rigor).Coppedge is just trying to use the classic creationist "argument via big numbers" and relying on the fact that most of his acolytic readers will not know any different.Or care.Further, maximum likelihood is a search criterion, not an intrinsic value.Coppedge is clueless. Perhaps for real.

Lemmon and Milinkovitch wrote a computer program that converges quicker on an ML model with larger number of taxa. They call theirs the “metapopulation geneticalgorithm.” It is a quasi-Darwinian model that tries to optimize trees based onmutations and selection, and it can incorporate rate heterogeneity estimatesinto the model. The authors try their program on real and imaginary populationsand compare their results with other heuristic methods.

The article in question came out in 2002. Coppedge writes as if such an algorithem is a new thing. To put this in perspective, I entered graduate school in 1999, and I started out using a computer analysis package that utilized maximum likelihood methods (as well as about 4 others) that was written nearly 10 years earlier. Below is Coppedge's snarky disinformative commentary:

Were you ever told in biology class that generating a phylogenetic tree from theraw data was mathematically impossible, and that no future civilization wouldever overcome this barrier? Probably not, yet textbooks are replete with neat,authoritative-looking phylogenetic trees. So how do they determine them? Byheuristic methods, which by translation, means guesswork, inference,trial-and-error, hunches and hope. Their model incorporates a number ofoptimization parameters, such as rate heterogeneity, which means that not allgenes mutate at the same rate, and branch length, the presumed evolutionarydistance between taxa.

Wow... Where to begin? No, Coppedge, heuristic methods do NOT at all mean "guesswork" etc. And for a NASA employee to denigrate trial and error??!?!?? Is he for real? One of my interests is spaceflight, and I have seen many programs about the space program, and NASA's history is little BUT trial and error! And the shock of a program incorporating rate heterogeneity! Imagine, incorporating what the evidence indicates! I have little doubt that one can find on Coppedge's site some snarky little essays decrying any notion that all genes mutate at the same rate. And as far as branch length goes - the programs FIND the branch length as part of the analysis! How can it incorporate something that is one of the outputs of the algorithem!This guy is CLUELESS!

The tweak space is enormous, and they already have a mental picture of what theywant, so this whole approach is based on circular reasoning. If the programoutputs a tree that agrees with the evolutionary assumptions, is scores high;otherwise, it is rejected.

Amazing. Coppedge - who should at least have a basic understanding of the terminology (since things like "heuristic searches" are common computer science terms) , is simply spouting nonsense. I challenge anyone here to read the actual paper and point out where the authors state that they already 'have a mental picture of what they want' and somehow force the program to spit out this desired result. The entire purpose of the paper in question was to outline the authors' procedure for producing phylogenetic trees using large datasets with many, many taxa more quickly than can be done with existing methods. Coppedge acts as if they are merely trying to find a way to make a program that produces what they want it to (he must be confusing real science with baraminology).Of course, what they set out to do - to make a computer analysis program that can analyze large numbers of taxa in large datasets more quickly and just as accurately as existing but slower models all but requires them to 'know' what they want to get - that is how you test your model! Does Coppedgfe REALLY not understand this?

Does this provide any confidence that evolution is being confirmed empirically?Is this how scientists in our universities should be spending their time,playing Darwinian computer games?Instead of explaining how mutation and naturalselection could produce a Monarch butterfly or a finch or a peppered moth in thefirst place, scientific papers on evolution seem obsessed with trying to uncoverphylogenetic relationships that are impossible to calculate objectively orverify independently without begging the question whether common ancestry iseven true.

Is this how a taxpayer-funded NASA scientist should be spending his time -writing disinformation filled drivel to prop up his religious beliefs?And the coup de grace - Coppedge at his sleight of hand best. We see this silly sentiment in many creationist rants - this whole 'those evos are ASSUMING evolution is true when they do their experimets!' as if that is a bad thing to do.Do creationists assume creation is true when they do their experiments (I mean, if they did any)?Do physicists assume that gravity is a constant throughout the universe when they plot spacecraft flight paths?Of course they do - why, I'd even bet that NASA computer technicians like Copppedge assume certain things about the software writing programs they utilize and the models they make.

I would like to point out that this distortion-laden diatribe was one of the shortest I could find on Coppedge's site on this subject. I can only assume that longer rants have even more distortions and embellishments. But David Coppedge need not be concerned -his like-minded readers will believe everything he writes - he is a YEC AND he works at NASA, after all - and will think his smug insults are all well deserved by those evilutionists.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

A fellow who has left a couple of comments here decided to write about a comment I left for him on his blog. It is pretty funny:

I recently got a comment on my blog and I would love to share it with you. I will leave the name of this individual anonymous but see if you can see what is missing in his comment.

"I appreciate the spammed post on my blog. I deleted one and posted the other. No Darwin did not have an electron microscope, nor did he know about DNA. Had he, I predict that the would have really enjoyed the vast amount of evidence supporting his basic premise that one can find there". (Which this person commenting does not mention here!!!). " Are cells simple? Not really(not really, look at your science not at all!!!). But simply arguing that they are so complex that could not have arisen by 'chance' and thus evolution is false thus biblical creationism is true is just wrong on so many levels." (yet he does not mention or give facts stating how it is wrong!!) "And I wouldn't be so quick to trust the claims by the folks at ICR in the first place (which he offers zero evidence why other than they disagree with his ideology).- they require al of those associated with them to take oaths that they will never cast doubt on creationism (simply not true), and have a pretty good tract record of having their, shall we say, less than honest antics exposed (Which again he fails to mention one single occurrence.)

Did you see what was missing throughout this man's whole entire argument?? Facts? Again where are the facts, he has been reduced to name calling and empty allegations. Offer me one proof of anything you say. Read my blog post simply not simple in which I quote Charles Darwin!! Yet he offers zero evidence on which his position stands. Then the evolutionist like this man have the audacity to claim that we are the ones who believe in blind faith, who have no evidence. DNA has the amount of info to fill 500 books with a 1000 pages each, an incredible amount of information on a molecular level. Where does this information come from?? How would Darwin be overjoyed if he had an electron microscope?? WHat is it within a cell supports organic evolution?? Darwin himself said the opposite, he said "if it can be demonstrated that any complex organ exited which could not have possibly been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down". (Origin of species) 1872, p.154

So this man who commented said Darwin would be overjoyed, when he himself wrote the quote above which is exactly what we see in a cell. Darwin wouldn't be overjoyed, he would calling for the glory that is due to the Great Creator...

I plan on dissecting this when I have the time, but could someone please point out where I called anyone names? Or is this persecution complex thing a common trait in these folks?